My colleagues and I have been attending Cisco Live! this week at the Mandalay Bay Convention Centre in Las Vegas with over 500 of our friends from Canada and over 15,000 attendees from around the world. Combined with over 40,000 people attending virtually, this makes this year’s event by far the largest ever.
Cisco Live! is our annual conference where we celebrate together with our customers and partners by engaging in deep technical learning, where you can meet the engineer who built the product, debate future of technology and of course party (we are in Vegas after all).
At the heart of Cisco Live! is a customer technical exchange that has run for nearly two decades. Listening to our customers is core to our culture at Cisco. There is no better venue or event where we hear loud and clear how we help our partners and customers and what more we can do. Canadian press and industry analysts are also down for the parallel Cisco C-Scape conference. Several Canadian CTOs and CIOs are participating in the Cisco IT Executive Symposium making for a very diverse audience.
Over the course of the week I have had the opportunity to meet with many customers and partners from across Canada and there is tremendous excitement in the air around the opportunities ahead, not only for their company or organization but for themselves as well. I have been hearing how our customers and partners are taking our products and architectures and innovating some really creative solutions that are making a substantial difference to their business. Canadian customers have some very innovative initiatives in the areas that align to Cisco’s priorities, namely:
- Core Routing and Switching
- Data Centre Virtualization and Cloud
- Collaboration
- Video
- Architectures
Our own Technology Solutions Architect, Dave Zacks, is going to be delivering a technical workshop later today along with a case study on University of British Columbia’s network virtualization project. I consistently find that organizations from around the world are very interested in the types of innovative solutions Canadian customers are deploying.
It really reminded me how privileged we are to have as many loyal customers when I saw the Mandalay Bay arena filled to the rafters at John Chambers’ keynote Tuesday. In his session he talked about Cisco’s priorities and reaffirmed our priority of listening to our customers and a new simple mantra “You Ask… We Deliver”.
While there has been fantastic learning all week we’ve had our share of fun as well. On Tuesday night we held the Canadian Customer Appreciation Night on the terrace at the Pure Night Club at Caesar’s Palace overlooking the strip. It was packed with over 500 customers and partners are sharing experiences very late into the night. Last night Train played for the entire group of 15,000 attendees and we expect to have a blast later today when Canadian William Shatner closes out the event.
Whether you were able to join us here in Vegas or virtually make sure to mark your calendars for Cisco Live! 2012 which will take place a bit earlier, June 10-14 in San Diego. We look forward to hosting you again next year – and continuing our journey together!
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